A 24-year-old man was arrested yesterday after he abducted an 11-year-old girl he had met online.

John Peter Byrns, 24, met the 11-year-old while chatting online, playing the video game “Minecraft.” He was arrested after authorities tracked the young girl’s cellphone and found her with him at a Holiday Inn Express in Macon, Georgia.

“She was chatting with the individual through a game,” a Bibb County Sheriff’s spokesman said in a Monday news conference. “Within the game, you can use a headset to chat with the people you’re actually playing with. So that’s how the first initial contact we believe was made.”

According to the young girl’s father, Byrns was pretending to be a female in order to lure the little girl from her home.

“This is someone that she’s been communicating with online under the guise of being a female and basically has just pulled her into a trap, so to speak,” her father said.

Police say that the man was dangerous, and that they are lucky she wasn’t harmed. “I would say she’s lucky to be alive,” Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said. “She’s lucky that the circumstances aren’t any worse than what they are.”

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